Herman Rosenblat's Holocaust memoir of love is exposed as a hoax

James Bone in New York

A
heartwarming Holocaust memoir that is to become a big-budget film has
been exposed as a hoax by a Jewish survivor in Britain only weeks
before it was due to be published.

Herman
Rosenblat's Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love that Survived,
tells how he met his future wife as a girl when she threw apples to him
over the barbed wire fence of the concentration camp where he was held.

Oprah Winfrey, who twice invited Mr Rosenblat on to
her talk show, hailed the book as “the single greatest love story ...
we've ever told on air”. The still-unpublished memoir became the basis
for a children's book and $25 million (£17 million) feature film,
The
Flower of the Fence, which is due to start shooting in March.

The
February 3 publication date was abruptly cancelled at the weekend,
however, when Berkley Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA), said it
had received “new information” from the author's agent.

Mr
Rosenblat, 79, a retired television repairman living in Miami, said
that he met his future wife while he was a teenage boy in Schlieben, a
sub-division of the Buchenwald concentration camp.

The
nine-year-old girl, he said, tossed him an apple. The two met again by
chance when Mr Rosenblat agreed to a blind date with a Polish immigrant
named Roma Radzicki in Coney Island in 1957, and recognised her. They
married soon afterwards.

Holocaust scholars doubted
the story, and it was exposed by the New Republic magazine. Ben
Helfgott, a former Schlieben inmate, told the magazine that Mr
Rosenblat's story was “simply an invention”. Mr Rosenblat joins the
swelling ranks of discredited memorists. “I wanted to bring happiness
to people,” he said. “I brought hope to a lot of people. My motivation
was to make good in this world.”

The film's producer
plans to go ahead. Harris Salomon, of Atlantic Overseas Pictures, said
he had always planned a “loose and fictionalised adaptation”.